1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image reproducing apparatus and an image reproducing method and, more particularly, to an apparatus and a method in which groups of compressed image data in a plurality of channels are decoded in synchronization with each other.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Motion Picture Image Coding Exert Group (MPEG) method and the Joint Photographic Coding Exert Group (JPEG) method are known as recent high-efficiency image coding methods.
Coding systems based on these methods basically utilize discrete cosine transform (DCT), adaptive quantization and variable length coding (VLC) to transmit data by encoding the data with respect to a plurality of frequency components.
With the recent development of multimedia communication, a need has arisen of simultaneously decoding a plurality of kinds of encoded image data in a plurality of channels, for example, in order to simultaneously display or print images from the image data on one display screen.
In such a case, when one image is synthesized from groups of encoded image data in a plurality of channels as described above, there is a possibility of large variations in brightness and hue with respect to the channels, so that the resulting synthesized image is unnatural.